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Japanese Text @ Copyright Kiwao Nomura, 1987-2008English Text @ Copyright Kyoko Yoshida and Forrest Gander, 201 I

Cover Art: Lichen Mashsby K. Ruby BlumeCeramic, photograph by K. Ruby Blume

Book cover and interior design by Ken Keegan

Offset printed in the United States on archival, acid-free recycled paperby Thomson-Shore, Inc., Dexter, Michigan

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Kiwao Nomura was born October 20, l95l in Saitama Prefecture,Japan. He graduated from'W'aseda Universiry majoring in Japaneseliterature. A leading writer of the post-war generation, he is in the

forefront of contemporary poetry. At the same rime, he is known tobe a prolific critic, translator, and essayist on comparative poetics.

His work has been translated into many languages and published inmagazines abroad, especially in France and the United States. He has

performed internationally and released t',rro CDs of collaborationswith musicians. He played a leading role in the Contemporary

Poetry Festival 95: Poetry Goes Out and the Contemporary PoetryFestival 97:Dance and Po€sie. In2007, he organized The Festival

of International Poetry: Toward the Pacific Rim. From Augustto November 2005, he was a fellow ar rhe International \Writing

Program at the Universiry of Iowa in the United States. In Decemberof the same year, he served as a director of the Japan-European

Contemporary Poetry Festival in Tokyo."

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Introduction

I.(spectacle&pigsty). 18(and when I embraced you) 24Barely Hinged

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2628On Prose

Last Song(or visage) .D6ji vu Avenue(rain)

II.(or waves) .The Sea Beyond This'World(or Manhattan)(one day, suddenly) .Panegyric to the Perineum .Insuffiation Feast.(scattering dust, we go crezy)

III.On the'Way to the Site of Doppo's Lodge

v(like abstractedness) .(or chasm).Eyeground Road .(draft) .(or pigsry) .(nightly we are taken)CodaI am Knitting, No. 2 (felicity subsrance channel)Romance

Biographical Notes

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IntroJuction

Famous for electrifying performances of his work, Kiwao Nomura isrevered in Japan, where he has been awarded major literary honors,including the Rekitei Prize for Young Poets and the prestigiousTakami Jun Prize. His inspired work as a writer, editor performer,organizer, and critic has altered the landscape of contemporaryJapanese literature. Two CDs of his readings with musicians havegenerated a following in both Japan and France.

Nomura's work is iconoclastic-at once playful and heady, saturatedby his interest in philosophy, Japanese shamanism, music and art.A poem ostensibly about a pigsry and Oedipal fixation incorporaresreferences to Nietzsche and French philosopher Emmanuel Levinasin such away as to suggest the pigsry as a metaphor for self andpoem. (Nomura's insistent synracrical conjunction of "pigsty'' and "I"underscores this metaphor). Throughout his work, Nomura overlaysthe visible world of criss-crossing streets with the microscopic worldof "nerve ants," refusing to acknowledge any fundamental differencebetween cosmic and molecular, far and near, moment and whole,instant and eterniry. His poetics, as such, run currenr with thewritings of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose books (on cinema andon Nietzsche, in particular) stress the importance of intuition andinsight as a means for disrupting our creatural habits. Both Deleuzeand Nomura envision reality as ceaseless movement and invention.

The longest sequence included here is based on a pilgrimage to rheplace where Kunikida Doppo, a celebrated poer from the turn of thecentury once lived. Stylisticdly, the poem takes place in what Frenchtheorist Guy Debord might call "situationist Drift." Doppob lodgesite is real in as much as it is a historical marker of the spot whereDoppo once lived, but it is not real, since the lodge collapsed longago and the city ofTokyo has risen around its ruin. \Mhile the poemtspeaker ambles through the ciry toward the lodge site in order to payhomage to the old poet, he remembers Doppo's poems and wrestleswith the continuous, even "infinite" presence of the past in theobliterations and transformarions of the presenr. As his meditation

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intensifies, he gradually releases himself from the impossible ambitionof arriving at any meaning small enough to be nested in the toponym(as Nomura calls it) or manifestation (x Deleuze calls it), "Doppo'sLodge." Instead, the sojourning poet submits himself to chanceencounters and perceptions, following the Deleuzian insight that "Allbecomes clear...i[, beyond these manifestations, we aim our questat Life itself." Along the way to the site of Doppo's lodge, a fabulousweave of recurring tdismanic terms, wild shifts in tonal register, andword play keep both pilgrim-poet and reader alert and in thrall.

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(spectacl" I pigsty)it's pigsty Ithe darkness maybe darkness stupendously stretching out now like taffyman fed up with man star with star

itt pigsty Ipity the pig that eternally rerurnsto the darkness as spattering splotches of light

below Mother's diseased pineal glanditt pigsty Iscreaming drowning in a dark that fenestrates rhe eternal joist

itt pigsty Imust be five times more I than Iwhen trying to listen to the scream

below Mothert diseased pineal glanditt pigsty Igushing sunlight like nightsoil onto the eternal joist

or the nightsoil like sunlightit's pigsty Iwho mulch silencet muck while it laughs, steaming

each bent in bent outeach urged, cajoled, or shackled gently to anotheritt pigsty I

itt pigsry Ivertigo: when the whole becomes centerattuned to the place where fat oak leaves futter

every day is vertigo its margins boiling over like foamitt pigsty Ieyeing pieces of I in bewilderment weird is it not?

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itt pigsty Isee the burning skull through the pain-board gaps ohfawn-colored'$Thirlaway gallops by

the thick 6re wall of pain-board sleep ohperforated with pinholes staring outitt pigsty I

it's pigsry Ibabbling bugs clamoring through the perforationsit's like I'm coming down with a rash of pinheads

itt pigsty Iswallow me swallow me Mother expiringand never again shit me our

never shit me out again Motheritt pigsty Ithis crawling body this wad of nothing but heat

itt pigsty Iimagine faces but they're phantoms underwhich the face of a girl comes clear as srarvarion

when eternity canters offin the shape of a horseitt pigsty Iit's pig always pig that returns

it's pigsty Ipacked with menacing muscles tenseddecent solitude crappy solitude crumbling crumbling

itt pigsty Ididnt nodce in the winter dusk howthe muddy corridor leads to the pigsty

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itt pigsry Iburning to set an earthly convenience store on fire no reason whatsoeverthat muscles gleam and piggies wiggle